Indeed, and in a wholly determined universe all revisions are only ever as they could have been. Including the revisions in my own moral trajectory from an objectivist to a nihilist.
But what I still construe is a gap between what we know about, say, the manufacturing of weapons of mass destruction in the either/or world and the arguments in the is/ought world about whether or when or where they should be used.
Similarly, objective facts can be noted regarding the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. What then are the equivalent facts regarding the conflicting arguments over whether he ought to be confirmed?
I take my own existential leap here recognizing that it is embodied in a political prejudice rooted in dasein and conflicting goods and political power.
You take your own pragmatic leap but are [seemingly] less concerned with or by those factors.
“Scientific philosophy?” And how close is that to an ontological understanding of what needs to be known about the existence of existence itself?
What I am looking for instead is an argument aimed at narrowing the gap between revisions in the either/or world and revisions in the is/ought world. With regard to interactions in the either/or world, there’s a difference between wishing they were something else, and demanding that they ought to be.
This part:
This to me is just an attempt to suggest that with respect to either the either/or world or the is/ought world, there’s no getting around the possibility of or the potential for revision. Like if we go out far enough on the “reality” limb, the biological components embedded in the medical procedure used to perform an abortion may well be in sync [re revisions] with the moral arguments of those who are either for or against using it. Both equally open to revision.
Back again to the neat box that you put my neat box in. And me being considerably more fractured and fragmented in mine than you are in yours. So, in that sense, it might be argued that here and now your “I” actually “wins”.
As for your seeming obsession with my seeming obsession for “contraptions”, we just don’t think about “I” out in the world of conflicting goods in the same way. Maybe we can narrow the gap here, maybe not.
To wit:
All I can continue to recommend is that we bring these abstract “assessments”, “analyses”, “general descriptions” down out of the scholastic clouds and situate our understanding of “revisions” and “contraptions” in a context most here will be familiar with. You claim to have done so. Okay, but it didn’t take. So, try again.
Why don’t you and I and folks like Phyllo grapple with an issue like Communism. On another thread. Revisions abound here. Moral and political contraptions pop up all along the ideological spectrum.
Right?
But, then, after I note this re the assumptions embedded in my is/ought hole…
…it’s straight back up into the potential for holes that you see re the either/or world:
Yes, this may always be true. And that’s before we get to the “reality” embedded [for some] in Sim worlds, and in demonic dreams, and in solipsism; and in the many, many assumptions entangled in any number of “spiritual” or “enlightenment” philosophies.
What really can be entirely ruled out here?
But the bountiful revisions that seem particularly prone to bring about calamitous conflicts in our day to day interactions with others seem clearly [to me] to revolve around the assumptions that are made about the is/ought world.
It is here that the assumptions I make regarding the components of my moral philosophy and the assumptions you make regarding yours bring about a “sense of self” that result in a considerably more or a considerably less deconstructed “I”.
I’m merely grappling with and groping about for an understanding of your “I” here that might actually have an impact on how “I” have come to understand these relationships myself here and now.
You are the one [by and large] who seems intent on injecting “hostility” into the exchange. And I suspect it goes beyond polemics with you. And I have further suspicions regarding what might motivate you to make me the issue.
In fact the rest of your post here more or less revolves around what I construe to be a psycho-babble “analysis” of what makes me tick.
Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for your own rendition of this…
1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.
A way for me to understand how, with regard to a value near and dear to you, you came to intertwine what you think and feel about it in a sequence of experiences and relationships that shaped and molded “I” here over the years.
Isn’t that really as close as I am ever likely to get to “noticing the concrete individual” that has become your very own “I” here and now?